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There’s the small matter of seven billion transistors included – the most we’ve ever seen on a graphics card. They’re divided into eight of Nvidia’s Graphics Processing Clusters, each of which contains two of its Streaming Multiprocessors. There's no deactivation of streaming multiprocessors or CUDA cores: the GTX 690 boasts a mighty 3,072 stream processors across the card. The fundamental Kepler architecture is still in place. Nvidia's GPU Boost technology is still here, so the card will reach the heady heights of a guaranteed 1,019MHz if any game demands that level of power - a step down from the 1,058MHz of a single GTX 680, but a still a deeply impressive figure. Here, it's dialled down to a still-superb 915MHz. The GK104 core, for instance, was launched at a headline grabbing 1,006MHz - just 6MHz more than the 1,000MHz which AMD unveiled with its first current-generation card, the Radeon HD 7870. As usual with dual-GPU cards, the top-end specification has been trimmed back slightly for the dual-core version. It's not quite as simple as slapping two of those GTX 680 cores on one PCB, though.
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There's no sign of the economies of scale potentially caused by using one heatsink, enclosure or PCB to contain two Kepler cores, and Nvidia has been upfront about the cost of one GTX 690 mirroring that of two GTX 680s. Let's get this out of the way immediately: the GTX 690 costs £880. This time around it's Nvidia's turn and, as the firm's naming convention dictates, it's the GeForce GTX 690. Every year Nvidia and AMD queue up to release their latest high-end GPUs and, just as tick follows tock, they're swiftly followed up by a card that makes all but the richest of gamers weep: the dual-GPU monster. Click to enlargeWe knew this would happen.